EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 183duced by leading ecclesiastical figures, especially in their constant warfare on
heresy.^91 (Here, at least, Eusebius implicitly recognizes the polyvocality of a
tradition he usually prefers to represent as a more or less seamless historical
development culminating in the Constantinian Church of his own day.) The
two phases, scriptural and exegetical, ran concurrently, because it took the
Church until the end of the fourth century to finalize which books deserved
canonical status, the Old Testament (Septuagint) presenting even thornier
problems than the New.^92 The task was accomplished inclusively, therefore
durably, thanks to lived experience of regional variety and of the nexus be-
tween liturg y and teaching on which Justinian was to put his finger in legis-
lating about the synagogue services. Also without need of conciliar decrees—
in fact it was discovered that the Gospel book, enthroned or placed on the
altar to represent Christ’s presence (just as the Theodosian code was displayed
before the Roman Senate), was the best antidote to the precedence struggles
between bishops that marred so many councils.^93 This scene, frequently de-
picted thereafter in Christian art, made clear on the symbolic level what the
Diocletianic persecutors’ demand for surrender of books^94 had already ac-
knowledged in practice, namely that Christianity was a religion of the Book
as well as of bishops—though bishops were indispensable for policing ortho-
dox exegesis of all texts, creeds as well as scriptures.
The most prominent individual in Eusebius’s account of early patristics is
Origen (d. c. 254), who divided his career between Alexandria and Palestin-
ian Caesarea.^95 In the latter city, Origen’s intellectual heirs Pamphilus and
Eusebius himself (Caesarea’s bishop) continued to labor among the master’s
books.^96 Origen and Eusebius stand for one of the main threads of Christian
self- awareness and self- definition—learned and Alexandrian—during the
third and the first half of the fourth centuries. If Eusebius’s principal contri-
bution was to history, Origen’s was to theolog y distilled from book- by- book
91 For an example, see, e.g., Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 7.24–25 on Dionysius of Alexan-
dria. On the emergence of the concept of patristics, and Eusebius’s role in it, see T. Graumann, “The
conduct of theolog y and the “Fathers” of the Church,” in Rousseau (ed.), Late Antiquity [2:9] 546–54.
92 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 3.25 etc.; Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal epistle [ed. T.
Zahn, Grundriss der Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons (Leipzig 1904^2 ) 86–92] 39, for the earliest
complete list of twenty- seven books including Revelation; cf. B. M. Metzger, The canon of the New Testa-
ment (Oxford 1987) 210–12; C. Markschies, Kaiserzeitliche christliche Theologie und ihre Institutionen
(Tübingen 2007) 215–335; M. W. Holmes, “The Biblical canon,” in S. A. Harvey and D. G. Hunter (eds),
The Oxford handbook of early Christian studies (Oxford 2008) 406–26; E. Thomassen, “Some notes on the
development of Christian ideas about a canon,” in id., Canon and canonicity [6:59] 9–28.
93 C. Walter, L’iconographie des conciles dans la tradition byzantine (Paris 1970) 34–37, 61 (with 62
fig. 28), 75–77, 147–48, 235–39.
94 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 8.2.4.
95 Convenient accounts in T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass. 1981) 81–
94; A. Le Boulluec, “L’ “école” d’Alexandrie,” in J.- M. Mayeur and others (eds), Histoire du Christianisme
(Paris 1990–2000) 1.560–78.
96 A. Carriker, The library of Eusebius of Caesarea (Leiden 2003) 1–36.